The Eucharist in the Church: Chapter 1

Last weekend we commenced the large-scale project of preaching for a whole year on the Holy Eucharist. Today we offer Chapter one of the papal document ‘The Eucharist in the Church’. We’ll be moving at a good clip; I hope you can keep up!

Last week we noted that there’s a necessary link between the offering of every Mass and Jesus’ death on the cross. This connection isn’t merely a mental recollection, as if the phrase “do this in memory of me” were only a plea of Jesus something like ‘please don’t forget me when you have Mass.’ The more precise meaning is that when we have Mass, the Lord’s passion death are made to happen in this present moment. It’s not that we’re going back ‘there and then’ so much as it coming into the present ‘here.’

In just a moment I’m going to review with you the doctrine of the Real Presence. But first I want to say, with the Pope, that there are two ‘real presences’ in the Eucharist. The first is the once that we usually speak of: our Lord is personally present in his full sacred humanity. The other thing presence is His sacrifice. In other words, the saving thing that He did for us is also here. His sacrificial death that redeemed us is being reenacted at Mass in such a unique way that He does not die or suffer again but that His one-time sacrifice is brought into this moment of time and into this very place.

Our Holy Father backs up his teaching about the Eucharist being a real sacrifice by pointing out that Jesus did not merely say: ‘This is my body; this is my blood.’ He tacked on those important words which indicate a sacrificial connection: ‘this is my body which will be given up for you; this is my blood which will be poured out for you.’ ‘Giving up’ and being ‘poured out’ are sacrificial expressions. But, if you were to ask, ‘Why do we need to have our Lord’s sacrifice re-presented anyway; wasn’t it enough that it took place once and for all, long ago?’ The answer is that there has to be a way for Good Friday’s benefits to reach each and every one of us today. The Mass makes your soul and mine reconcile with God. Every day we sin; and so, everyday we need to offer Mass to compensate for our sins and to draw out from Mass the grace that will pardon them. (I suppose that if we were to cease having Mass altogether, evil in the world–already so strong–would totally engulf us and we would be submerged in an ocean of corruption so great as to be of apocalyptic proportion. But that’s just a side comment.)

Although the Mass is our Lord’s sacrifice in the strict sense of the term (that is, the ‘happening’ of His death), there’s another sense of sacrifice here as well. This is adding our own sacrificial portion to Christ’s sacrifice, spiritually offering up ourselves and our deeds. Our insignificant selves take on immense significance when we league-up with Christ. Then our lives have a worth, a pleasingness to God that they could not have otherwise. How else would my daily work, my worries and pains, and all the events of my day ever be accepted by God unless they were linked to Christ? We’d be foolish to think that our own works were so good of themselves as to be pleasing to God! Only attached to the sacrifice of Christ do our lives and deeds have eternal merit and worth. The Mass makes this possible.

Sometimes we hear that the Mass includes the memorial of our Lord’s resurrection. This is true but not in the sense that Mass re-presents the moment when Jesus’ soul reentered His body on Easter morning. The resurrection is represented at Mass in this sense, that even though we celebrate His death at Mass, this is the ‘alive Jesus’ who is present here and not the dead body of the Lord. It is in that sense that Mass has a vital connection with the resurrection.

The Pope also reminds us that when we say that Jesus is present in Holy Communion, we mean a real presence of His physical flesh and blood and His soul joined to the Person of God the Son. Therefore we don’t mean that He’s here in a weaker sense. For example, let’s say that I bring in a sculpture of the Pope and set it up in the church. We might say then that he would be present in his image. Fine. And if I read you a letter he addressed to you, we might say that he’s present through his words. Fine again. And if a papal delegate came in person representing the Pope, we might say that he’s present in his minister. Fine. Christ is present in all these ways here also: His image is on the cross above the altar, in the statuary, and in the symbol of the altar and the candles; He’s present too in His own words read to you in the scriptures; He’s present again in the person of His priest-representative; and finally, He’s present whenever two or three are gathered together in His name. All of these are different senses of the ‘real presence of Christ’ at Mass. However, this is not what we mean when we say “the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.” This expression means that He is here in the way that I’m here: alive, in the flesh, fully conscious and aware. If we could remove His disguise, the appearances of bread and wine, He’s be visible to the human eye as the same Jesus, God and man, seen on Easter morning. That’s what we mean by the real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

Just for the record, we have a word for the change-over from bread and wine into the Real Presence: transubstantiation. It means that bread and wine no longer exist once the priest consecrates the Eucharist. Only the adorable body and blood of our Lord are here. And this happens not in our minds, but objectively speaking.

A few final points. We call the Eucharist Communion because it makes us commune with God. Christ lives in us through Communion (of course, we have to be in a state of grace for this).

There’s a ‘forward-looking’ dimension about the Blessed Eucharist that should also be mentioned. “The Eucharist is a straining towards the goal,...the anticipation of heaven.” Holy Communion makes you supernaturally alive not only in your soul, but in body as well. If I may be excused for putting it in a somewhat flippant way: Communion is the miracle drug that will cure your body of death. (Pharmaceutical companies have nothing to compare with the Holy Eucharist.) But this is a delayed benefit that will be received only on the last day, the day of the resurrection of the body.

The Pope at the end of the chapter makes a comment that’s very timely for us, saying that the Eucharist should make us take responsibility in the world. What he means by that is that Holy Communion should make us work for peace among men, be just to others, assist the poor, and “defend human life from conception to its natural end.” This couldn’t have come at a better time than just before election day.

I hope you’ll take the whole of our Holy Father’s message to heart.